Ingá Stone — petroglyph
Image by IgorSuassuna from Pixabay

Ingá Stone

Pedra do Ingá

  • 2 min read
  • 7.325° S 35.585° W

Interesting facts

  • The engraved grooves on the main panel are up to 5 cm wide and about 8 mm deep, and were carefully polished smooth.
  • The wavy line across the vertical panel is made of exactly 112 small cup-shaped hollows.
  • According to tradition, local Potiguara people used the word itacoatiara when European colonists asked them what the marks on the rock meant.
  • Signs on the top of the rock are shallower and less carefully made than those on the wall below, and scattered rough scratchings elsewhere still puzzle researchers.
  • Some researchers think the crude marginal scratchings were made by an earlier culture, while others see them as practice sketches for the main panels.
  • The rock lay on private land that was donated to Brazil's federal government before it was listed as a national monument in 1944.
  • In 2015 the site was added to Brazil's tentative list for UNESCO World Heritage as the Itacoatiaras of the Ingá River.
  • In 2025 the state of Paraíba created a Natural Monument conservation unit around the site to protect the rock art.
  • The engravings are almost entirely abstract, which makes the site the most representative large-panel example of this non-figurative rock art in Brazil.
  • The stone inspired Shiko's graphic novel Piteco: Ingá, which reimagines a classic Brazilian comic caveman with an origin story set at the rock.

Why it is worth it

The Ingá Stone — Pedra do Ingá, or Itacoatiara do Ingá, from the Tupi for "painted" or "scratched stone" — is a long outcrop of gneiss lying in the bed of the Ingá river in the interior of Paraíba, north-eastern Brazil, and it carries one of the most remarkable sets of rock carvings in South America. Its main face is a vertical wall some 46 m long and nearly 4 m high, and across a section of it about 15 m long the rock is almost entirely covered with engraved signs. Unlike much rock art, these are not faint scratches: the grooves are broad, deep and carefully polished, as if worked over and over.

Most of the carvings on the vertical panel sit below a gently wavy horizontal line made of more than a hundred small cup-shaped hollows. Around and below it are spirals, concentric forms, rows of marks and shapes that people have read as animals, plants, human figures and stars; no one has deciphered them, and who made them and when remains uncertain. The outcrop has other panels too. On the rock floor in front of the wall, a group of rounded, rayed figures has been interpreted by some researchers as a representation of Orion or the Pleiades, and on top of the rock a large spiral is crossed by an arrow-like sign pointing towards the sunset.

Those star-like figures have drawn archaeoastronomers. From the 1970s the Spanish engineer Francisco Pavía Alemany argued that the cup marks worked as a solar calendar, recording the shifting sunrise through the year, and his interpretation was later included in an international collection of archaeoastronomy studies. It remains a hypothesis rather than a settled reading. What is not in doubt is the stone's long-standing recognition: the site was declared a national monument in 1944.

A visitor building and a small natural history museum with fossils and stone tools found in the area stand beside the site.

Getting there

The site is about 5 km beyond the town of Ingá by paved road; the town is reached from the BR-230 highway by the PB-090. Campina Grande is the nearest large city, and the nearest airport is Campina Grande's Presidente João Suassuna Airport (CPV), about 35 km away.

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in Brazil 44The Most Remarkable Rock Art Sites 16The Most Mystical Archaeological Wonders 73The Most Mystical Places 138The Greatest Archaeological Wonders 306

From the encyclopaedia

The Ingá Stone is located in the middle of the Ingá River near the small city of Ingá, 96 kilometres (60 mi) from João Pessoa, in Paraíba State in the northeast of Brazil. The Ingá Stone is also called Itacoatiara do Ingá. The word Ita means "stone" in the Tupi language of the natives that lived in that area. It is a rock formation in gneiss which covers an area of approximately 250 square metres (2,700 sq ft). Altogether primary, a vertical wall 46 meters (151 ft) long by 3.8 meters (12 ft) high, and adjacent areas, there are entries whose meanings are unknown. Several figures are carved in low relief in this set, suggesting the representation of animals, fruits, and astronomical features like the constellation Orion and the Milky Way.

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